A laborious work, Labyrinth – Halfway is the result of research and
\ncommunity art experiments conducted by visual artist Roxana Donaldson, visual
\narts researcher Cristina Irian and Cristina Bodn\u0103rescu, who was in charge of putting
\nthe footage and ideas of the two artists into a film that went on to be shown
\nat a film and video festival called VKRS Bucharest. Cristina Irian tells us
\nmore about the whole project:<\/p>\n
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This is both an artistic and a civic project because
\nit aims to provide an active response to the need to keep a community together
\nin times of crisis and symbolically salvage discarded flowers and turn them
\ninto art objects. I worked directly with bouquets of flowers Roxana got me from
\nthe market, from which I made eight dolls which I named the Matache dolls and
\nwhich appear to be dancing. In the second part of the project I used the dolls
\nand their shapes and added what I called poems in flowers. I kept a video record
\nof the entire transformation of a bouquet of flowers.<\/p>\n
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A performance was also created, and here’s Roxana
\nDonaldson telling us more about it:<\/p>\n
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We intended this project as an encounter
\nbetween people and plants in an urban environment. We wanted to speak about the
\nlives of people and that of flowers in these times of isolation and anxiety
\ngenerated by the Covid pandemic. We wanted to see how people live and survive together
\nin cities. The performance was inspired by the flowers discarded by the small
\nlocal producers in markets last November. This was the starting point and we
\nended up making a film and then turning the dried flowers into works of art. I’m
\nan interdisciplinary visual artist and I’ve always been interested in eco-art
\nand plant-art and I wanted to create interdisciplinary and conceptual art with
\nand about plants. The performance involved our meeting at the half way point between
\nher market and mine, where we each bought ten flowers on the last day before
\nthe markets were closed. And so, when we met at this halfway point, which happened to be on a street called Labyrinth, we exchanged flowers. We basically gave
\neach other flowers in the middle of the pandemic, during lockdown, at a time
\nwhen the city was cold, empty and shut down. We filmed everything, including
\nthe sounds of the city, because we wanted to create a record of our urban
\nperformance.<\/p>\n
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The life of the flowers continued in their adoptive
\nhomes, the artists’ homes, and after drying out, they underwent a process of reinvention.
\nRoxana Donaldson:<\/p>\n
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I painted their story on canvas, writing in
\npen ‘rescued abandoned flowers’ and these words blended into each other
\nbecoming patches of colour and over these patches of colour I sewed flowers and
\nthus created a work of art which I exhibited in the street as part of the
\nsecond performance. I called it Flowers Were Here, because the flowers had
\nreturned to a place they’d been to before. We each left a work: mine was a wall
\ncovering made from canvas with flowers and hers was a doll made out of dried
\nflowers. They remained on the wall where we exhibited them as part of this
\nfree-art performance, which is all about putting your whole heart into the creation
\nof pure art, art that is not regimented, and gifting it to the city, to the
\ncommunity, for free and unconditionally.<\/p>\n
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Cristina Irian added:<\/p>\n
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The first part of the project took place
\nin the morning, the second in the afternoon and the next thing is for us to meet
\nfor a third time on the same street, but this time in the evening, to use the objects
\nwe created in a different way. I will focus on the shape of the doll and the
\nshadows it casts in an endeavour to reactivate the space.<\/p>\n
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The third part of the project will have different
\ncomponents: a showing of a film on the life of the flowers which were transformed
\ninto works of art, an exhibition of new works into which the dried flowers are
\nintegrated, and a new urban performance. <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Three Romanian artists use discarded flowers to create an independent public art project.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":126,"featured_media":136519,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[42520],"tags":[33514,43289,43287,43288],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-136518","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-inside-romania","tag-art","tag-eco-art","tag-flowers","tag-plant-art"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n